Papers for

digital assistant teams

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Search agents learn to find better answers with fewer steps

Heterogeneous Co-Evolution Learning for Tool-Efficient Search Agents with Zero Labels

Abstract: Deep search agents extend language models by interleaving reasoning with external retrieval. However, effective search-agent training requires addressing two challenges beyond final-answer optimization. First, the capability frontier of agents is largely determined by training questions, whereas fixed or labeled task collections cannot adapt as agents improve. Second, outcome-only reinforcement learning treats all successful trajectories equally, even when some correct answers rely on redundant searches, creating an inherent tension between answer accuracy and tool efficiency. To address these issues, we introduce \textsc{ZEST-Search}, a zero-label and tool-efficient framework for search-agent training via heterogeneous co-evolution. Starting from unlabeled reference questions, \textsc{ZEST-Search} constructs validated search tasks online through an answer-first and evidence-path-guided generation process. A heterogeneous proposer adaptively constructs training tasks around the solver's evolving capability boundary, while the solver learns search-augmented reasoning through reinforcement learning. To jointly optimize task difficulty and search efficiency, \textsc{ZEST-Search} employs an intermediate-difficulty reward for the proposer and a task-local tool-aware reward for the solver, encouraging informative tasks and correct answers with fewer redundant searches. Experiments on seven general-domain and multi-hop question answering benchmarks demonstrate that \textsc{ZEST-Search} consistently improves search-agent performance while achieving higher tool efficiency without labeled search-training data or expert search trajectories. Further analyses show that heterogeneous generation, adaptive difficulty control, and tool-aware optimization enable more effective search-agent training.

Thu 29 OctMachine LearningArtificial IntelligenceInformation Retrieval
The gist
Search agents, which help answer questions by looking up information, usually need lots of labeled examples to learn. The authors introduce a method that allows these agents to improve themselves without any labeled training data. Their system creates new questions adapted to the agent's current skills and encourages it to find correct answers efficiently, avoiding wasted searches. Tests show the agents get better at answering and use tools more efficiently across several question-answering tasks.
Open → 2610.39682v1

ActionRAG improves long-term memory retrieval for large language model agents

ActionRAG: Evidence-Refining Graph Diffusion for Long-Term Memory in LLM Agents

Abstract: LLM agents need long-term memory that can recover precise and mutually consistent evidence from growing interaction histories, particularly when answers depend on relations among facts rather than isolated semantic matches. Current memory pipelines remain vulnerable at two stages: indexing errors can fragment repeated entities or merge distinct ones, and online retrieval often treats initial similarity scores as final even when the surrounding graph provides evidence for revising them. We introduce ActionRAG, a graph memory architecture that couples cautious indexing with query-time graph retroevaluation. Its indexing pipeline reconciles type labels and applies tiered entity resolution. Given a query, dual-channel entity and triple retrieval forms an initial evidence set and induces a bounded local graph. Query-conditioned receiver-normalized diffusion refines triple scores using local path structure. Seed protection, hub-penalized flux, and triple materialization preserve direct evidence while recovering missed connections. We evaluate ActionRAG on MemoryAgentBench (MAB), which tests accurate retrieval, conflict resolution, long-range understanding, and test-time learning. Across its eight deterministic-scoring columns, ActionRAG achieves 55.1 average accuracy, improving over the strongest retrieval-based memory baseline by 5.4 points. Under MAB's query-time cost accounting, mean synthesis cost stays below \$0.001 per query on the four reported cost columns, and the sum of separately measured retrieval-side p99 components is 440.7 ms on our consumer Apple Silicon setup.

Fri 23 OctArtificial IntelligenceComputation and Language
The gist
Large language model (LLM) agents need to remember facts accurately over long conversations, especially when answers depend on how facts connect to each other. The authors identify problems with current memory methods that can mix up or lose important details. To fix this, they created ActionRAG, a system that carefully organizes and refines memory using graphs at query time, improving how well agents retrieve and connect relevant information. Tests show ActionRAG is more accurate and efficient than previous methods.
Open → 2610.32752v1

Fine-grained steering enhances personalized large language model responses

FleetPilot: Fine-Grained Steering Empowers Real-World LLM Personalization

Abstract: With the rapid evolution of large language models (LLMs), there is an increasing demand for effective personalization techniques that can adapt model behavior to individual user preferences. Personalized LLMs must infer a user's query-dependent preferences from limited, heterogeneous, and evolving interaction histories. Existing approaches rely primarily on in-context personalization, parametric adaptation, or personalized reward modeling, but respectively incur recurring costs in context management, model optimization and deployment, or multi-candidate generation and scoring. These limitations become particularly restrictive when user observations are sparse and the preference evidence relevant to each query varies across contexts and over time. To address these challenges, we propose \modelname, a fine-grained and instance-tailored steering framework that dynamically generates sample-level interference vectors from user data and injects them into the model's forward pass for personalized adaptation. Our approach introduces: match contrast that produces user-relevant signals, fine-grained steering component that captures nuanced signals by hooking activations from attention and MLP layers, and query-conditioned aggregation module that synthesizes these signals into contextually relevant enhancements. Extensive experiments across diverse scenarios, including short-to-long text generation, and web function calling, validate the effectiveness and compatibility of \modelname. Results show that our method consistently brings significant performance gains, and show extreme superiority in fast-shifting and data-sparse environments. Additionally, \modelname rids us of training cycles and incurs light overhead of storage or inference latency. These make \modelname a strong and real-world deployable method. Implementation is available \footnote{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/FleetPilot}.

Sat 10 OctArtificial Intelligence
The gist
Large language models (LLMs) can be better personalized to individual users by adapting to their changing preferences. The authors developed FleetPilot, a method that uses detailed signals from user interactions to guide the model’s responses in real time. Unlike previous methods that need heavy training or generate many alternatives, FleetPilot adjusts the model on the fly using small preference signals, which helps especially when user data is limited or changing. Tests show that FleetPilot improves performance without slowing down the system or requiring costly updates.
Open → 2610.14970v1

Personal memory errors in language agents arise before text generation

Stale, Misattributed, or Late: Where Personal Memory Fails Before Generation

Abstract: Personal memory for language agents is usually judged by whether the final an- swer is correct. That score hides errors that arise before generation: the memory block may contain an obsolete value, a fact about the wrong person, or no use- ful fact before the serving deadline. We measure these failures directly. Using Personal Fact Memory (PFM) as a reference layer, we find that temporal validity is primarily a property of memory construction in our setting. On a controlled revision benchmark, serving only the active value of each correctly keyed slot eliminates observed stale exposure; without update resolution, 70.3% of prompts expose a superseded value. Once retrievers share the same active store and par- ticipant information, participant-aware BM25 is equivalent to the reference ranker within a prespecified 0.02 margin. The harder problem is assigning revisions to the right slot. Missed merges leave stale values active, whereas false merges silently remove current values; four LLM key assigners achieve higher key re- call than a rule extractor yet produce lower clean-retrieval rates, and open-domain merge recall on LongMemEval never exceeds 0.062. Misattribution survives va- lidity filtering: an entity posterior reduces same-name exposure on controlled data but cannot distinguish identically named speakers in LoCoMo. Two frozen lan- guage models reproduce prompt errors in generated text. Retrieval latency varies across rankers, but prompt prefill dominates turn-level latency on our hardware. These results argue for evaluating agent memory before generation, separating stored-state validity, identity resolution, abstention, and serving latency.

Wed 7 OctArtificial Intelligence
The gist
Language agents that remember facts about people often make mistakes before they even start talking. This can happen if their memory is outdated, mixed up between different people, or missing info when needed. The authors studied these memory problems directly and found that the hardest part is correctly matching updates to the right slots in memory. They also showed that some errors remain even when trying to filter them out before the agent answers. Their work suggests it’s important to check memory quality before generating any text.
Open → 2610.10265v1

Graph methods compared for recalling long term agent conversations

TAGGRAPH: Tag-Augmented Graphs for Graph Retrieval of Agent Persistent Histories

Abstract: Long-term memory lets LLM agents recall past interactions and remain consistent across sessions, but memory systems are hard to compare because they often vary in representation, indexing, retrieval, and evaluation. We present a controlled evaluation framework based on shared 5W-style conversational memories. Localized graph configurations traverse a common base graph; AdaptiveGraph adds chronological edges and Personalized PageRank diffusion. We also evaluate BM25 over the same extracted notes and OpenClaw as a raw-input external reference. Retrieval rankings vary across memory settings. On LongMemEval-S, AdaptiveGraph is the strongest graph configuration at 0.844 MRR, but BM25 reaches 0.867 and OpenClaw 0.880. On ATANT Core, localized graph traversal outperforms diffusion and BM25, whereas BM25 leads the stress rounds. Reducing LongMemEval-S within the tested range does not reproduce the ATANT diffusion penalty, but the smallest tested store remains larger than ATANT Core, so store size cannot be ruled out. The penalty also persists under a permissive content-match criterion. Vocabulary normalization and extraction quality substantially affect graph retrieval, and missing extraction tags are common among top-five misses. Retrieval strategies should therefore be evaluated jointly with the memory setting and against strong lexical baselines.

Tue 29 SeptInformation RetrievalArtificial Intelligence
The gist
Remembering past conversations helps AI agents stay consistent, but it's hard to compare different memory methods because they use different ways to store and find information. The authors tested several graph-based and text-based retrieval methods on shared conversation records to see which recalled information best. Some graph methods worked well, but a text-based method called BM25 and an input-based method named OpenClaw often performed better. They found that how information is tagged and organized heavily affects how well the system retrieves memories.
Open → 2609.38353v1

Deep search agents improve planning and answer summarization

IterSynth: Rethinking Deep Search Agents via Role-Decoupled Iterative Synthesis

Abstract: Deep search requires LLM agents to decompose complex queries, search for evidence, and synthesize grounded answers, yet existing ReAct-style agents suffer from two limitations: role coupling, where one policy must handle planning, evidence use, and synthesis; and context accumulation, where growing search histories introduce noise and obscure useful information. To address these issues, we propose IterSynth, a role-decoupled and summary-based paradigm that alternates between a Planner for identifying information needs and a Synthesizer for integrating evidence into an evolving summary state. This design separates planning from synthesis while using the summary as the persistent state of search, reducing both capability coupling and context noise. To train IterSynth effectively, we further introduce Role-Decoupled Policy Optimization (RDPO) for reinforcement learning, which combines terminal outcome rewards with turn-level rubric evaluations and computes role-specific advantages for more precise credit assignment. Experiments on five long-horizon deep-search benchmarks such as BrowseComp and Xbench-DS show that IterSynth-8B achieves an average score of 50.7, surpassing the strongest prior $\leq$8B agent by +4.2\%. Moreover, IterSynth serves as a model-agnostic prompting paradigm, delivering substantial zero-shot gains over ReAct and similar prompting paradigms on frontier proprietary models.

Thu 24 SeptComputation and LanguageArtificial Intelligence
The gist
When AI tries to answer complicated questions, it needs to plan, look for evidence, and combine information into a clear answer. The authors found that having one AI policy do all these tasks leads to problems and confusion. They created IterSynth, which splits planning and answer building into two separate parts that work together with a summary to keep track of progress. This method helps the AI find better answers by avoiding noise from long search histories. Tests show it works better than previous similar AI agents, even on tough problems.
Open → 2609.29444v1

Q-TIE improves search results by understanding time in queries

Q-TIE: A Lightweight and Generalizable Re-ranking Framework for Temporal Information Retrieval

Abstract: Temporal Information Retrieval (TIR) has been increasingly critical given the rise of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). Since temporally mismatched evidence can be highly misleading, TIR aims to retrieve documents that are both semantically and temporally relevant to a query. Two TIR paradigms have emerged - temporal retrievers and temporal re-rankers - differing in how temporal relevance is modeled. While these paradigms provide complementary strengths, our analysis reveals that each alone falls short of robust TIR: temporal retrievers provide flexible query understanding via learned representations, but often fail to explicitly account for temporal constraints; temporal re-rankers can enforce such constraints more explicitly, but often rely on predefined re-ranking rules. To address this, we propose Q-TIE, a re-ranking framework based on learned Temporal Intent Extraction (TIE). By introducing a TIE model that maps each query's temporal constraint into a unified interval representation (i.e., $\langle t_{start}, t_{end} \rangle$), Q-TIE generalizes beyond predefined rules via model-based learning while explicitly modeling temporal constraints as a separate signal - jointly achieving what each paradigm typically trades off. Experiments demonstrate that Q-TIE consistently outperforms existing TIR methods with stronger generalizability across temporal query types, and provides a lightweight yet effective add-on for temporally-aware RAG pipelines. Code: https://github.com/ssoy0701/Q-TIE.

Sun 20 SeptComputation and LanguageInformation Retrieval
The gist
Finding information relevant to a certain time is tricky because current methods either understand the query well or check time details well, but not both. The authors propose Q-TIE, which learns to find the time period a query refers to and uses that to better reorder search results. This helps to make sure the documents you see match both what you asked and the right time frame. Their tests show Q-TIE works better than previous methods and is easy to add to existing search systems.
Open → 2609.23880v1